An Empire of Their Own : How the Jews Invented Hollywood

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Summary: Movie Jews Starring in Their Own Life Movie
Review: Neal Gabler explores the lives of the founding movie moguls of Hollywood in this work which is at turns funny and sad. Most of the moguls never had a very good family life either growing up or growing old, but the stories of the business and oddities of Hollywood are amusing.

One of the most interesting of Gabler's points is that each head of the studio made a certain style of movie that reflected his personality--whether that would be Mayer's idealized America or the Warners' stories of tough outsiders, for instance.

Gabler gives interesting insights into the struggle between Edison and the Jewish independents over who would monopolize the distribution and equipment for the business. It is suggested that this was fight between protestants on one side, and Jews and Catholics on the other, given the ethnic make-up of the two camps. Edison eventually lost out over an anti-trust suit and the movie moguls went on to pretty much monopolize the business until they lost an anti-trust suit in 1948.

The reason why Jews have predominated in the movie business from the beginning was that in the early days of film, it was considered a slightly disreputable business to be in and white gentiles had no great desire to enter into a venture considered to be a novelty to make some fast cash. The Jewish businessmen saw the movies as something more than a novelty and sought to make them more high-brow by filming critically acclaimed plays and literary works. This was done also to bring in the middle class into their already working class customer base.

Gabler shows how many of the movie moguls wished to present themselves as totally assimilated Americans who made themselves over to look like the high class gentiles of the Eastern Establishment. But at the same time they saw themselves as Jews and their enemies saw them as Jews too. The years of blacklisting communists is covered in which some gentiles complained about the moguls employing communist Jewish writers for their films. (The moguls themselves were Republican and many of their writers we're Jewish communists.)

Hollywood is shown to be place where there is no real friendship and materialism reigns. In their cutthroat business, those on top are celebrated as long as they stay successful and those who have fallen are forgotten. This rule even applies somewhat to the movie moguls of this era. Anyway, one gets the impression it's more fun to watch the movies than to be in the business of making them.

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Summary: Definitely startling in emphasis and omissions.
Review: On Sunday, March 22, 1998, A&E presented a documentary based on Neal Gabler's "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. The presentation was entitled "Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream". I quote the ad: "Theprogram shows viewers the development of movies from a startling new perspective, revealing that classic Hollywood themes of white picket fences, little guys fighting the odds, outsiders who become insiders, and the lone hero riding off into the sunset, were dreams born in the oppressed Jewish [shtetls] of Eastern Europe." This "newperspective" was so startling that this viewer was forced to wonder if Mr. Gabler [or the creators of the documentary] is completely unacquainted with the theatrical (and literary) fare of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as much that has been done since the founding of Hollywood. I will present only two examples to demonstrate my astonishment (perhaps others will occur to those who also saw this program). 1- The "documentary" claims the American musical to be a Jewish invention (with a side comment on the existence of Cole Porter as an anomaly) due to Irving Berlin and "Teams" like Learner & Lowe and Jerome Kern (I was unaware that Jerome Kern was a team). I mention only one progenitor by way of example: Despite any number of film cuts showing Jimmy Cagney singing and dancing from the numerous musical works of George M. Cohan, George is not mentioned as one of the more prolific, popular, and influential originators of the American musical. Perhaps the author(s) were misled by the name of Cohan (not, alas, Cohen) which is a fine Irish name but sounds very similar to the Jewish one (a fact George commented on as being to his advantage). 2- The frequent insistence that the "white picket fence", the importance of mother, the children, and the "family" was an invention of Jewish immigrants suffering from the horrors of Russian pogroms seems to discount the entire nineteenth century German, French, English and American Romantic tradition (Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa Mae Allcott, to mention a few). I suggest the author(s) read "Little Women". I fear the author(s) have fallen into the contemporary trap of feeling compelled to devise a new and different "hook" on which to hang their material, to the point of obscuring the very real contributions made by the Jews in both the theatrical and motion picture world. Despite a rather plausible view that the HUAAC brought about the fall of these moguls, I suspect the reasons were somewhat more complicated: Economic changes made the old studio system impossibly expensive. Much of the monies now came from Eastern financial institutions. Television had been born and was beginning to supplant Hollywood in a number of critical B-movie areas. International distribution was assuming much more importance (we now supply at least 80% of the entire world's movie fare). Theatre artists (particularly directors and actors) wanted to move on to independent productions, etc., etc. There is no need to insist that these movie moguls created the world in seven days. Much of it was quite adequately created by other people (i.e., My Fair Lady was, after all, drawn directly from the non-immigrant Irishman, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and did not spring full blown from the Jewish immigrant's need to express the plight of the outsider who was forced to learn to speak English). In creating the ultimate American Dream, the author(s) could have had the decency to mention (although they showed a number of film cuts) the contributions of that distinctly non-Jewish immigrant, Frank Capra. The brilliance of these Jewish immigrants consists in the ways in which they comprehended and grasped the evolving "American Dream", articulated by every generation and country of immigrant aspirations, and how they developed the organization and machinery to produce the incredibly various celluloid manifestations of those dreams.

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Summary: Powerful Historical Account
Review: This book by Neal Gabler is a well written account about those individuals that initiated the biggest movie studios of all time. From Adolph Zukor and Paramount to Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures to Louis B. Mayer and MGM, this book offers a riveting synopsis of what drove these men to so the things that they did and to make the decisions that they made. I highly recommend this book to anyone that is seriously in search of information on the origins of some of the most powerful companies with such a profound impact on American thought.

BNS FOREVER.

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Summary: Jewish Influence remains a problem
Review: This book shows more than anything that Jewish influences and 'propaganda' in hollywood remain a serious problem even today.

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Summary: Fascinating but sometimes frustrating
Review: This is, to the extent of my explorations, the only book on what would seem to be a pair of significant questions about American mass culture: why did the Jews take control of the motion picture industry in its earliest days; and how did that fact shape their creations and the culture they influenced? For its uniqueness, its thoroughness in investigating the relationships of the early film moguls to their religious heritage, and its wealth of detail regarding their lives, I applaud it. I find myself, however, yearning for a second book, or a revised edition, for this first exploration leaves much untouched.

Neal Gabler states early on that the moguls' vision of "America" shaped not only the fictional realities of their films but the reality of America itself, in that it was through Hollywood that we developed much of our self-image. Apart from passing mentions, however, such as noting that our later vision of a lost, small-town America was largely shaped by memories of the Andy Hardy series beloved by Louis B. Mayer, he does not develop that important thread.

There are also a few frustrating narrative lapses that set me to reviewing the index to see if I'd missed something (which I hadn't). The author leads us through the story of Paramount's Adolph Zukor, whom he presents as perhaps the most important and emblematic of the moguls, to a point at which Zukor is poised to seize a commanding role in the national distribution of films. Gabler then cuts away, and when we return to Zukor we find that his expansionist efforts have failed and his position at the studio is now in jeopardy, though we are not shown how.

I recommend this as a fascinating beginning to an exploration. I hope there will be more books like it to develop the story further. Perhaps, in time, we will even see books that will treat the same questions with regard to popular music, comedy, and other fields so shaped by the Jewish people.

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Summary: AN EMPIRE THAT HAS FLOWN
Review: When Siskel and Ebert left PBS for greener pastures at Buena Vista in 1982 an equally competent and even brighter team of movie reviewers, Michael Medved and Neal Gabler replaced them. Unfortunately these replacements never achieved the soaring if ephemeral popularity of the originators of Sneak Previews.

All too soon Jeffrey Lyons replaced Neal Gabler before we got to know him. In 1988, Gabler's book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood, was published.

Here, the Golden Age of Hollywood is presented as an Age of Brass. We get to know on a first name basis the small group of Jewish immigrants, from the turn of the last Century rejected from mainstream American corporate business but with equally human hunger for comfort and wealth. They left their father's limited little businesses to jump on the Thomas Edison often-derided risky bandwagon of moving pictures and realized its true promise. They did this not out of the motive of a pioneer's dream of courageous exploration and but with the lust for gold of the Conquistadors.

Neal Gabler's book is a competent work. It offers an erudite tour through the various personalities in the early years and the reasons why this most unlikely group, using the most powerful and influential medium ever invented actually shaped the American Dream that we know today.